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Barnaby Rudge

I just finished Barnaby Rudge, apparently called Barnaby Rubbish by Victorian people because they disliked it so much. I get that it’s a really weird novel, but I don’t know if it deserves all the hate. It’s *way* better than Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance.

I especially liked the ending of this historical novel, which focuses on the raven, Grip. The narrator writes in the final paragraph: “as he was a mere infant for a raven, when Barnaby was grey, he was very probably on talking to the present time” (688). The suggestion, of course, is that the events of the past are not really past as the conclusion moves between biographical, historical, and ecological time.

But I also liked the crowd scenes and its somewhat contradictory reflection on the law. At the peak of the riots, “The crowd was the law, and never was the law held in greater dread, or more implicitly obeyed” (521). Such a sentence shows the power of the crowd: rebelling against the law, the crowd becomes a law onto itself. But it also raises questions about what the law is for. Is it supposed to be held in dread? It is supposed to be obeyed?

Mr. Dennis, the hangman, has the strangest relationship to the law. He happily joins the riot and works to free the prisoners of Newgate, but stops short of freeing those prisoners condemned to die. As they beg to be released, he tells them, “laws have been made a’ purpose for you; a parson’s kept a’ purpose for you; a constitootional officer’s appointed a’ purpose for you; carts is maintained a’ purpose for you–and yet you’re not contented” (543). His logic here is so familiar: think how much care the state shows you as it condemns you to death, how dare you desire to live? The phrase “laws have been made a’ purpose for you” is especially telling, suggesting that laws exist to produce criminals, for criminals. Contentment, here, means accepting a social order where you are doomed to die long before you commit a crime (Hugh’s fate seems to reinforce this point).